Overlapping Instantons

TL;DR

This paper investigates how overlapping instantons affect their combined action density, revealing significant deviations from simple addition and implications for identifying instanton content and confinement effects.

Contribution

It introduces the impact of overlapping instantons on action density profiles and their role in confinement, highlighting the importance of instanton interactions in gauge theories.

Findings

Overlapping instantons significantly alter action density profiles.

Parallel instantons can hide large instantons, affecting detection.

Large instantons contribute notably to confining interactions.

Abstract

Overlapping instantons have an action density profile that significantly deviates from the simple addition of the density profiles of single instantons. This turns out to have important consequences for identifying the proper instanton content of a given configuration. Most dramatic is the case where the instantons are parallel in group space, leading to the effect of hiding large instantons. Sufficiently large instantons can have important contributions to a confining interaction.